you're using a machine.... how does it work? What leavening is involved? Does it drop the dough into hot oil? I know nothing about donut machines (can you tell?) but that doesn't mean I couldn't come up with ideas. :)

use it to translate 'tapioca donut recipe' into the language of whatever country you were visiting's language. Then visit that page and untranslate it into English. Asia is a rather huge place with many different languages, you know. So it is kind of difficult to pinpoint a recipe based on the clues you gave here. I do know that some non-gluten breads use very hot water to swell the starch and make a dough, so that may be part of the technique — or not.

I would track down the company that manufacters or distributes the machine and ask someone there how the donuts are made, etc. They might be able to help you out or provide you with a juicy lead or two. Good luck.

1. If you're trying to duplicate a franchised donut (like Mr. Donut's doughnuts), then perhaps you should buy into the franchise. Often times when you buy the equipment (like with Lil' Orbits doughnuts), you get the recipe along with all of the matching smallwares and paper goods.

2. If you're trying to duplicate an authentic Asian doughnut, what is the Asian name for it, and in what country did it originate?

-Mark

Oh, and one more thing. If it is something that is mass produced (like it looks like in the YT video), it's probably just a complete mix that is bought, then mixed with water to make a batter. If that is the case, then rather than trying to duplicate it yourself, you just need to find the source for the mix.

Since we have established that the recipe contains wheat flour, I now suspect that it is mostly wheat flour with some tapioca and lots of sugar. It might be just a slightly modified commercial donut mix with the chewiness determined by the mixing process (more mixing than a regular cake donut would be subected to to develop some gluten). Perhaps there is an autolyse stage as well to allow the tapioca to fully absorb the necessary moisture either before or after incorporation of the leavening agent. You might look into a model that is based on the Portugese malasada which might be the origin of the cheese puff as well.

In the video they were dropping crullers in the oil, could it be cruller the interior looked a little dense for that but who knows. Éclair (choux pastry) is what the cruller is based on could it be something like that? It has a texture totally different from cake type or yeast raised donuts and doesn't have the short texture associated with most donuts.

Crullers with tapioca flour in place of some of the wheat flour might get the texture. It should reduce the tendency for hole formation if the flour/tapioca ratio is right. Don't know whether the tapioca should be the first thing or the last thing to get wet. If first, you might get the gel to form early after which the flour could be incorporated. I think I would try that as an initial approach. Another option might be to cold soak the tapioca to pre-form the gel and combine it with the cooked flour before adding the eggs. Lots of degrees of freedom to explore in the process.

In a cake donut recipe you avoid building gluten while the yeast type donut requires you to develop the gluten for the dough to rise. From past donut experience, it seems counter intuitive, when you decrease the water content you increase the cook time with cake donuts. We use to make a batter for extruding with the Belshaw hopper right over the oil and using the same dry ingredients we made a stiffer batter that could be rolled and hand cut into stick type donuts, i.e. honey sticks, walnut crunch. The hand cut ones took about 3 minutes to cook while the extruded variety (old fashion, chocolate glazed etc.) took a minute to minute and a half in the fryer. I think the moisture in the batter must facilitate the heat transfer to the centre of the doughnut.

You may be closer than you think. 3:1 wheat flour to tapioca may be too low. I am not surprised that at that ratio the tapioca overwhelms the wheat flour in terms of absorption. I might try 10:1 and see if you can detect the effect of the tapioca. Since this is a commercial mix that you are trying to replicate, it will have been adjusted to include as little of the more expensive ingredients as possible to get the desired effect. Adjusting the liquid will be necessary as well, since the tapioca ties up so much water. The sugar should tend to thin it out, and you may not need as much as a cake donut would dictate but 0.5-4T per cup of wheat flour would probably not be too much. It may also be the case that your flour is too strong, though there are so many variables in the mix at this point that to adjust the flour before you are close to what you want may just add complexity where you don't need it.

How about adding some diastatic malt as it seems to leave varying amounts of moisture depending on the percetage used. It can also add some chewiness. Or some other type of dough conditioner. Just a thought.

The Belshaw machines are made to extrude cake batter and deposit it directly in the oil, when you make yeast raised donuts you need to let the donut rise after forming the shape. Most places put the formed doughnut on screens for rising, if the dough is too slack the dough will go through the screen then when put in the oil it won't seperate easily from the screen. The result is a donut that absorbs a lot of fat. With a proofer we let the doughnuts rise 30 to 45 minutes depending on dough temperature and ambient temperature.

I like Mini's observation that the effect of tapioca plus soaking time is similar to pregelatinizing some of the flour (thanks Mini for another of your cool insights). But I don't think you are developing the gluten at all. In a batter (like a 90% hydration yeast bread) it can take 10 minutes of high energy mixing to get the gluten to really develop even with high gluten flour. Can you use a little tapioca and a lot of mixing to get the dough to develop? Then if you need to thin it out to get it to run through the machine, add enough liquid back to get the viscosity you need. Some people make ciabatta that way, developing the dough a little stiffer than they really want it just because it is faster to mix then adding back the water they need. The photo showed a very fine crumb texture that looks a lot like a tangzhong result. I am pretty sure that you should be able to develop the gluten in a soft (tangzhong-like) dough levened with baking powder. The gluten should give you the chewy texture, and you may be able to enhance it with xanthan gum and more tapioca (or not).

I have been thinking about this are you running a donut business and want to add this as a variety to differentiate your store from the others or are you hoping to build a business around this product? I think these type of niche products take a long time to build a following.

In my experience we made almost 40 different donut varieties daily but the vast majority of sales were honey glazed, raised chocolate, apple fritters, dutchies, old fashion cake and chocolate glazed. All the remaining varieties probably only enjoyed around 20% of sales but required close to 50% of the time in the production schedule. If you ran out of the less popular varieties it seemed as if every other customers was ready to buy them. Over the years we launched lots of varieties and even though some enjoyed good initial sales non stuck around in our regular production schedule.

My point is you may enjoy these but unless you are filling an ethnic market demand you may never find a market large enough justify the effort.

I am from Ontario, Canada so think a meet up isn't easily done. My donut years are long behind me, I think October 1997 was when I baked my last donut. We did all our baking at night and even though I tried to staff all the shifts it seemed that I always had to step in bake at the least opportune times.

I now have a business that allows us to work 9 to 5 for about 10 months of the year, the other two months have a lot of 12 hour days, and take a vacation without worrying if the baker will catch the flu or break an arm etc. The part of the donut business that I found least appealing was that you started every day with no inventory, long hours of operation which makes staffing a big challenge and then the market changed. When we first started in the late '70s we sold about 50% coffee and 50% donuts by the time I sold it donut sales were less than 15% of sales and it was hard to justify the expenses involved with baking donuts. Health concerns caused people to be less tempted by deep fried treats, to make up for lost donut sales we started to sell bagels and lunch items which were all lower margin making it a less attractive business. Sometimes I felt like the guy in the Duncan Donut comercial that only had time off to sleep and then back to making donuts.

Replicating and for a donut shop. (Their donut glazes are as amazing as their donuts.)

IIRC, their kitchen didn't have any specialized equipment for their donuts, but this is probably due to their usage of pre-mix powder. One location had an open kitchen, up until my last trip when they moved the window.

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